"Thor: God of Thunder" PS3 and Xbox 360 Launch Trailer and Q&A

Thor: God of Thunder is out and so is the launch trailer! We recently had a little one-on-one time with Andrew Rubino of Liquid Entertainment, the developer of the game on PS3 and Xbox 360 platforms.

According to Andrew, the Thor game uses elements from the movie universe, but also draws heavily from the comics. With regards to length of the game and replay value, he said there are several worlds, but each world has multiple chapters. The first play through takes around 10 hours, but upon completion, a “New Game+” feature opens up where gamers can attack the game on a new difficulty level.

Here’s more of what we learned during our Q&A Session:

What was your specific role in the game?

My specific role was combat design. I did all the enemies, all of the bosses. I had a lot to do with all of the encounters that you fight. Once the Lead Designer and Game Director came up with them, I picked it up from there. I did a lot of implementation stuff. I was physically implementing the AI and Thor’s moves in the game.

What was the most difficult area of the game to design?

As someone who worked on the tutorial, that’s always tough. In the first five minutes, I have to tell you how to play the game and establish why it’s totally awesome! But most of the the time, the totally awesome stuff requires you know how to play the game. So, it’s trying to find that balance. Particularly with Thor, we wanted to make sure that if you weren’t familiar with Thor, or you just saw the film, that we introduce these characters and you know who they are and what’s going on.

Were you able to contribute any original characters or did you adhere more to the established universe?

We had a lot of characters in the game who are in the comics but we re-imagined them. Our Surtur doesn’t look like the Surtur in the comics. Obviously, Surtur’s not in the movie. We also have some brand new characters. We have Skraelings who aren’t in the comics. We did a lot of re-imagining. Here’s the troll, but here’s our version of the troll. Here’s Ulik, but here’s our version of Ulik. Mangog is in the game. He’s our final boss. I don’t know if you know what Mangog looks like. He looks like a giant monster who’s purple with yellow underpants. Kind of silly looking and we have a version that’s very true to who that character is, but still looks very good looking, very cool and makes sense with the universe we’ve created. So, we did have a lot of liberties.

What was villain was the most fun to work with?

Oh, man. I guess Surtur. Surtur was one of the first bosses we worked on and he’s such a super important character in the Thor universe. He’s sort of Odin’s anti-thesis. He’s an ancient evil. If in the Norse mythology. Odin is god then Surtur’s the devil. So, it was fun to bring that character to life. And that was sort of the first time we were really exploring a lot of the different mechanics and that all coming together was really exciting. And I’m a comic book fan. So, it’s nice to see Surtur represented in a really cool way.

Thor: God of Thunder is out on the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii and Nintendo DS right now. Launch trailers for the Wii and DS are also available.